Stardew Valley had been on my radar for ages before I finally launched it this past week. What greets you is a quiet farming and life sim that one person, Eric Barone (handle “ConcernedApe”), built and shipped in 2016, with his name in the opening credits. The vibe sits near Minecraft in open-ended sandbox feel, a natural pick for someone wanting to decompress or burn through a slow afternoon. My copy lives on Steam, though the game has spread to Switch, Android, macOS, PlayStation 4, iOS, and beyond.
Read against Chess’s framework, Stardew Valley is a textbook case of what she calls “playing as a feminist,” though the fit shows up in unexpected places. Start with the absence of a climax: no boss, no final mission, no narrative crescendo at the end of a leveling curve, the structural signature of abnegation inside the 8 kinds of fun. Competition gives way to a slower, casual loop. The social atmosphere reads as distinctly non-toxic, with no leaderboards or hostile chat pushing players against each other. Underneath all of this is a large deal of agency and control handed back to the player, and that combination of low-pressure tone and genuine room to choose lets the game feel welcoming across gender lines and dodge the “toxicity barrier” Chess critiques in so many mainstream titles. What follows is a closer reading of how the game embodies feminist theory, threaded through my own play experience, ending on a discussion question.
A quick honest note before the design discussion: the game clicked with me more than I expected. What pulled me in is that Stardewasks for submission rather than mastery, mapping onto Chess’s argument that leisure focused play is the kind of engagement women have historically had less room for. Sinking into a game without a scoreboard or kill count felt like a real shift, and the case for engaging with games one likes and dislikes alike helped me sit with what was unfamiliar. Even the thin guidance worked in my favor; I looked up a tutorial only to deepen the experience. I can see myself sinking many more hours into this.
Chess’s emphasis on agency and control surfaces in Stardew across multiple design choices (which is why I’d slot it under abnegation). The character creation screen hands the player the tools to shape the persona who lives through the experience, letting me walk, farm, and live vicariously through my digital variant. With no handheld rules or quests, exploration feels free and self-directed. The world is cleanly divided between the player’s space (the farm) and society around it, so the player can lean introverted or extroverted without overt penalty (you can even sell crops through the mailbox). The passive flow of time is a powerful tool for simulating real life. Direction isn’t imposed; the player decides how time is spent. Together, these features produced an explorative aesthetic that let me submerge myself in my own universe.
Another layer is the way Stardew treats obstacles as relational rather than physical, sidestepping the “masculine” template most games default to, where progress is gated behind shooting monsters or beating enemy players. Picture the inverse of a typical Pokemon town, where any door is open and the player wanders inside at their disposal; here, doors stay shut until a relationship with that townsperson exists, and friendship unlocks new content. What this demands is that the player practice emotional intelligence rather than skill, which fits more naturally with a feminist way of thinking. The first time I tried to step into part of a house and got blocked out, I was caught off guard. That refusal grants the NPCs a kind of “realness” and a right to privacy the player can’t invade. It pushes the player to check their privilege, recasting the whole thing as an experience rather than just a game.
To close, I want to sit with something my enjoyment raises rather than settles. It would be easy to take “I liked Stardew” at face value, but Chess would push past that reading. If “masculine games” really do function as a background curriculum, training a male audience from a young age in what counts as fun, what excitement should feel like, what an obstacle looks like, then my reaction to Stardew is doing more than registering a preference. It’s running up against everything I learned to expect from a game. The discussion question I’d leave open: when a player raised on competitive, climax-driven design says a feminist aligned game like Stardew “worked” for them, is that genuine appreciation, or relief at stepping outside conventions they didn’t realize were pressing on them?
